The Myth of the Amateur and cultural change in college sports

Two recent and insightful books from the University of Texas Press look at how sports can be both revolutionary and reactionary.

Sports change and evolve. They adapt to the shifts in culture and, in many cases, cause them. Yet while some aspects of athletics can be revolutionary, others are more reactionary. Two recent releases from University of Texas Press capture the two sides of this dichotomy. First, there is Frank Andre Guridy’s The Sports Revolution which captures a sporting world in motion as the Civil Rights Movement and second-wave feminism were transforming the country. Second, Ronald A. Smith’s The Myth of the Amateur captures a more reactionary organization (the NCAA) as they attempt to redefine what it means for collegians to be “student-athletes,” fighting against rights for players in the process. Both books are ultimately successes, though each succeeds in a different way.

Guridy’s The Sports Revolution examines the ways the world of athletics changed and evolved in Texas from the end of Jim Crow to the early 1980s. Accordingly, much of the book looks at the gains made by Black athletes and women in arenas where their participation had previously been denied. In addition to that, it is also a tale of a changing society where newly wealthy Texans who had earned millions in oil fields decided to invest it in sports as a way of showing the rest of the country that they had indeed arrived. It thus captures the transformation of previously rural areas into massive metropolises whose identity was shaped by their professional sports teams. Altogether it is a book that looks at the different impacts sports can have: “on a region’s political economy; on the country’s popular culture; on the ways manhood, womanhood, whiteness, blackness, and social belonging were understood and reimagined.” These threads are all engagingly and intelligently brought together throughout The Sports Revolution.

Guridy shines the light on a number of stories, many of them lesser-known to modern-day sports fans. Among others, he covers the Washington Senators’ transformation into the Texas Rangers, the desegregation of the Southwest Conference, and the early years of the San Antonio Spurs. He shows great skill in both selecting and depicting these moments, using each to make some greater point about the shifting societal dynamics of the era.

And when he does focus on more well-known moments, such as the Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, he places it in a wider context so that it is seen anew. In that chapter, he introduces readers to women like Gladys Heldman who played a vital behind-the-scenes role in popularizing women’s tennis and also displays the ways the broadcast echoed and spread sexist talking points. At the end of each chapter, readers are kept wanting more, which speaks to how engagingly these stories are told. Yet never does Guridy exchange insight for breeziness.

While The Sports Revolution is largely a story of triumph, it is also a tragic story with “social dynamism” ultimately being “replaced by a hyper-commodified world of exploitation.” While women and athletes of color were offered more on-court opportunities than ever, few if any ascended to management or executive positions where they would have decision-making powers. As Guridy writes, for these athletes “equality meant ‘integration’” but that this integration occurred “under the supervision of more powerful white male team owners, general managers, and coaches.” He goes on to say that revisiting this period “invites us to rethink what we mean by integration in our time, when the limits of the victories of that era are painfully clear every day.” The Sports Revolution is then a prompt for readers to more fully consider what it means to fight for justice both on and on the court, and how to more thoughtfully engage in those battles today.

The biggest revolution in modern sports has been piercing the myth of the amateur

Meanwhile, Ronald A. Smith’s The Myth of the Amateur looks at the history of scholarships for college athletes, the debates over whether they should be allowed, and then what such aid should constitute. In less than 250 pages, Smith is able to thoroughly cover this issue from the first intercollegiate sporting event in 1852 to the present court decisions and legislation that have set the stage for today’s college athletes to earn money on their name, image, and likeness.

As Smith sees it, amateurism as a model inherited from the British was bound to fail in America for a number of social reasons: there was “too strong a belief in merit over heredity, and too abundant, an ideology based on freedom of opportunity for the amateur model to succeed.” Yet colleges in the United States still clung to the idea of amateurism while denying it in practice by offering athletes a number of financial benefits for playing. In Smith’s eyes, even scholarships, which have long been allowed by the NCAA, negates the idea of calling NCAA athletes amateurs. If this point seems like a bit of a reach, as it initially did for me, that’s only a testament to how good of a job the NCAA has done at establishing the parameters of the discussion until recent years.

Particularly insightful is Smith’s analysis of the term “student-athlete,” which he convincingly argues was “a deceptive concept from its origin in the 1950s to ward off potential governmental and legal actions in workers’ compensation and taxes.” Ultimately, Smith’s argument is that major college athletics were never amateur; the entire concept was “illogically conceived and conducted” and should have been dispensed of “well before legislators and judges became involved.” It is difficult to imagine how one could read this book and still believe that amateurism is a coherent, ethical, or practical idea today.

However, while this book is an insightful and informative look at the evolving ways that amateurism has been defined in collegiate sports over the last century-and-a-half, it is not likely to be a book that will interest casual readers. The book is written in an academic style where narrative and characterization are deemphasized in favor of a too-often sterile dispensing of facts. Also, in spite of the book’s chapters progressing chronologically from 1852 to the present day, there often seems to be a lack of cohesion between them. It feels like they were written individually rather than with the others in mind. It is undeniably well-researched and sure to be of use to anyone curious about the subject, but anyone without a preexisting interest in the topic is likely to be put off by its stilted prose style and the overwhelming amount of information. For those deeply interested in it though, this book is a must-read.

Guridy and Smith have written compelling books that sports fans will enjoy, though each has different strengths. Both books are intelligent and insightful works, though Guridy’s is the more gripping read and is more likely to be of interest to the general reader. It is simultaneously smart and entertaining while introducing many fascinating stories that may be new to many and recontextualizing long-familiar ones. For those interested in the ongoing debate about paying college athletes and how the ideas about amateurism in the United States have evolved over the last century and a half, one could hardly find a better book to read than the Myth of an Amateur. Each successfully considers, from different perspectives, the evolving ways that athletes and culture have intersected and how the shifts in one often mirror the other.